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List:       ietf-tls
Subject:    Re: [TLS] Accepting that other SNI name types will never work.
From:       "Fossati, Thomas (Nokia - GB)" <thomas.fossati () nokia ! com>
Date:       2016-03-04 7:06:09
Message-ID: D2FEE434.6084F%thomas.fossati () alcatel-lucent ! com
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Hi Adam,


On 03/03/2016 18:49, "TLS on behalf of Adam Langley" <tls-bounces@ietf.org
on behalf of agl@imperialviolet.org> wrote:
>The Server Name Indication (SNI) extension in TLS has a provision to
>provide names other than host names[1]. None have even been defined to
>my knowledge, but it's there.
>
>OpenSSL (and possibly others) have had a long-standing bug[2] (fixed
>in master) that means that different types of names will cause an
>error. To be clear: I live in a glass house and am not throwing
>stones; these things happen. However, it means that a huge fraction of
>the TLS deployment will not be able to accept a different name type
>should one ever be defined. (This issue might have been caused by the
>fact that the original[3] spec didn't define the extension in such a
>way that unknown name types could be skipped over.)
>
>Therefore we (i.e. BoringSSL, and thus Google) are proposing to give
>up on this and implement our parser such that the SNI extension is
>only allowed to contain a single host name value. (This is compatible
>with all known clients.) We're assuming that since this is already the
>de-facto reality that there will be little objection. I'm sending this
>mostly to record the fact so that, if someone tries to define a new
>name type in the future, they won't waste their time.
>
>If the community wishes to indicate a different type of name in the
>future, a new extension can be defined. This is already effectively
>the case because we wouldn't fight this level of incompatibility when
>there's any other option.
>
>(I think the lesson here is that protocols should have a single joint,
>and that it should be kept well oiled. For TLS, that means that
>extensions should have minimal extensionality in themselves and that
>we should generally rely on the main extensions mechanism for these
>sorts of things.)
>
>[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6066#section-3
>[2] 
>https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/OpenSSL_1_0_1-stable/ssl/t1_lib.c#
>L1066
>­ note that the data pointer is not updated.
>[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4366#section-3.1
>
>
>Cheers
>
>AGL
>
>-- 
>Adam Langley agl@imperialviolet.org https://www.imperialviolet.org
>
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